Sleep cycle Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Well, after two days of sleeping until almost one in the afternoon, I’ve gone and messed up my sleep schedule again. To be honest with myself, the cycle has been a bit messed since Friday when I accidentally read through the whole and happened to look up and see dawn creeping towards my bedroom window.

I hate the feeling that I’ve been up the entire night; I just feel like I’ve been robbed of something. I think I’ll just have to take it this week since I’m in no mood to try and go the full day without any sleep again.

I played Rock Band for the first time in two weeks today…and I loved every minute of it. I realized that Lego Rock Band was perhaps a poor choice as I dislike playing it and only play it because I know that there are achievement points lying in wait for me with it. The important thing, however, was that I played because I had a moment while I was cooking dinner and I didn’t even bother to keep compulsively checking the achievements page to see where I was; I played the game because it was fun to play, though I hate the majority of the music on this version.

I wrote 306 words today (on the east side of the lake) and finally came to a close on this church scene which has led to some interesting character development for Damen as he wonders just how Brit sees him. I also realize that my character Desirae Adams is in need of a name change as her name no longer fits with my naming scheme since the letter D carries it’s own importance.

Before I forget, I think it’s worth noting that I got “served” with my first copyright infringement today over my Calvin and Hobbes website, Midnight Calvin. The thing had been up and running for the past three or four years, if not longer, and now Universal Syndicate has decided shut down the little site. Oh well…I’ve not updated it in eighteen months even for the past two or three years, the only updates I’ve had were to include a new “strip of the day” though I only updated that once a year. I guess, I’m just irritated by the idea of it. I hope that if I get published, I won’t be party to this kind of thing. I say now, that I wouldn’t care that if people “pirated” my things as long as credit was given where due because it could only encourage them to buy more of me. I suppose that’s not how the rest of the world sees things. Pity.

Something else I’ll add, though it does not concern me directly: The trial of Casey Anthony has had me intrigued since I first kept seeing her face in tabloid headlines and heard her name whispered amongst my co-workers. The case seemed like such a sure thing and, while I’ll never have direct information about what did or did not happen, I can’t help feeling the same anger many other people felt about OJ Simpson. That helpless realization that there is not justice in this world is simply so unfortunate. I’ve ranted enough on Facebook and Twitter about this, but I needed to cement my thoughts here as well.

I didn’t do much else today, though I had plenty of options, but I liked doing some piano scales for a bit and will continue to read tonight as well. I’m reading Sense and Sensibility currently and while I’d love to get up to the point where I’m reading a book a week, if I’ve learned anything from this latest mental cleansing that I’ve gone through to give me clarity on life, there’s no rush.

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Pink on the map Friday, June 10, 2011

I was a little disappointed when this storm finally hit. Aside from some rather loud thunder, we didn’t really get much of anything. Still, it is a bit unsetting to look at the weather and see pink on the map.

Instead of another day of Rock Band, I started to peruse my poor and unloved main website to see if I had even remembered to renew the domain for another year. I started to make a minor update and then decided to add my Twitter feed to it and then decided to update my About Me page and then decided that the About Me page needed some layout changes and then decided…well, it was late in the evening when I had finally reaching a coding and design stopping point. I tried to do some laundry only to find that the flooding had got even worse and showed no sign of stopping.

The plumbers came very quickly and seemed to have corrected the problem, but I’m a little worried to go back down there and see what they’ve done to my basement.

Even with all the code written today and playing with Photoshop, I managed 297 words (clean her up like you did when you were little) and practiced a little piano too.

I started up Lego Rock Band and was quite tickled at the first little video that showed the band coming together. I also learned I could play guitar and sing and dance at the same time as I played “I Want You Back” for the first time. I can tell I’m going to have great fun going through these achievements and may even hold onto the game just for the heck of it.

As I predicted, my Frasier Season 7 has arrived and I’ve got hours worth of Niles and Daphne wonderfulness coming my way, so I won’t be doing

All We Have Is Now Monday, March 21, 2011

by The Flaming Lips ~ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

I’m doing my best to write from downstairs as I paused a The X-Files episode right in the middle of the Duane Barry/Ascension piece and long to go back to it, but want to continue my obligations to myself.

Today was a much better day than the days before it, but this evening as I set to write, it occurred to me that I’m coming in close to 60 full days where I’ve written every single day. Outside of breathing, I can’t think of a single thing that I’ve done every single day for 60 days straight, so I’ll have to mark my 60th day with something special.

The most interesting thing about watching The X-Files for me is that I can simultaneously watch an episode through my eyes as a 10-17 year old (depending on the season), yet still watch it as an adult. I remember noticing small details that I first noticed at 10 years old watching the show, but can then analyze them with 21st century 26 year old eyes. For example, Mulder is trying to find a particular park that Duane Barry mentioned after he “abducts” Scully and he reaches for some kind of book, I assume a phone book. At 10, I probably wouldn’t have understood what he was searching for or through, but at 26, my first thought was “Why doesn’t he just Google the…oooh.” Because then it occurs to me that in these episodes, it’s 1994 and Google is still a decade from existence.

All this said, when I think about The X-Files, I think about comfort. Watching the show is like wrapping an old, worn blanket around my shoulders and brings with it the sense that everything is going to be okay. I turn to many things in times of stress and depending on the level and how long and deep that stress has pressed, I may turn to different things. As far as turning to the Bible, that’s (as of this point in my life) for times when the darkness is so wide and deep, I doubt I’ll ever see light again (aka, someone has passed). I turn to writing when I can’t seem to think straight or can’t focus my thoughts on anything other than that which causes me strife, for example, an episode of SVU showed Olivia in a prison getting attacked by one of the guards. Not only was that episode unnecessary vivid, it also portrayed one of my own worst nightmares and I could barely function properly until I sat down and wrote a simple story about it, that is, I wrote out the stress.

Today, I’m neither so stressed that I feel the end is near, nor so stressed that I’m unable to focus on anything other than what is causing it, but I still feel the need to be comforted. Sometimes, I seek this comfort in watching an old TV show or movie, or reading a book or just plain creating new code for my website, but for this bout of stress, I’ve turned to the show I watched from childhood through adulthood. Their voices, no matter what they’re saying, soothe me better than any music and, even though I’m watching Mulder and Scully chase down flying saucers, the show has the same effect on me as my mother rubbing my back and singing the Kangaroo Song as she did when I was child.

Tonight, I wrote 275 words (Where is your mother) and even though I spent much of today reading about the improbability of ever getting published, I’m still glad I wrote.

Back to reality Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Things I’ve done today:

• Completely edited a WP theme and fit my main blog.
• Retextured a sims hairstyle in both a Maxis-match cartoony look and a more realistic texture, including more than 8 colours for each and renamed and binned all the new hair. (Took close to two days to complete all this and I still doubt it’s share-ready)
• 
• Deleted a bunch of purple, pink and cherry red sim hair from my Red bin and made appropriate natural red recolours.
• Watched at least six “Seinfeld” episodes.
• Went to the gym.
• Uploaded a pic to my Project 365.
• Wrote 510 words.

I say actions speak louder than words and I’ve had an outstanding day! 🙂

That last one was the one that took the most out of me, even more than going to gym when I hadn’t been since probably August. I’ve never worked so hard for 500 words in my life. By the time I got to 400, they were coming a little easier, but I must have written the tie-between scenes for when Damen first meets Corey and when Corey invites him to his grandfather’s house, three or four times before I came to something worthwhile. Each time I attempted to write a scene, everything seemed like it was happening too fast.

Damen was suddenly happy and all I had to “show” how it happened was half a paragraph where I just told what happened. Very lame.

I’m on a roll now, so I’ll keep writing for sure. I said that yesterday as well, but got sidetracked by trying to edit a theme for my main blog (blog.doriennesmith.com) to death. I figure I’ll just have to create my own theme at this point to get everything that I want in a theme, but that’s a project for another day.

I have to say, I was little perplexed earlier this evening when I started to sit down with my tomato soup and fire up an episode of “Coupling.” I realized that I hadn’t updated this blog or my Project 365 and I leapt from the sofa, soup in hand, and ran upstairs to do some writing and uploading.

While I think I’ve got it a little backwards, writing so that I’ll have something to post instead of posting because I’ve written something, I like the idea of it. I’m kept honest by the fact that I’ve got a real deadline and if it works…it works!

A weird kid Thursday, June 4, 2009

I haven’t been writing at all lately.

I haven’t even looked at the notes for Damen since at least Monday. I guess I’m in some kind of slump or the old bipolar monster has reared her head again and I’ve been too low to think creatively.

Anyhoo… Even though I haven’t been writing, I’ve coding and designing the crap out of my site. I completely finished my About page and made it a little more asthetically pleasing and hopefully it makes a little more sense than the list of words I’d had there previously.

I’ve still got to create the “Dorienne Presents…” page and redo the links page before I’m ready to “launch” version 3.0 of the site. I suppose another week of heavy coding and designing should get me ready.

Also, I’ve been simming a lot in between all this coding. I’ve been playing a lot of sims that I hadn’t played in probably close to a year. It has been wild fun re-discovering some of the dormant stories in the game. I think I’m ready to bring the neighborhood to a new generation, but this may be a result of the BPD monster working her magic, so I’m not really sure.

In the midst of the coding and the simming, I have been trying to rescue my Geocities pages. It took about an entire day to get through all my sites because I’d definitely abused their services by creating about a half dozen names and linking them all together to get a site that was close to a small site with about 50MB of space total. I’ve not really made use of Geocities’ services since 2004 when I’d created Dorienne Smith.com, but I wanted to keep everything for posterity sake. My hope is that they allow a redirection service for all those sites that have owners that continually log into their accounts, but I doubt that is going to happen. I had to save a Japanese writing site that had a mirror through Geocities as well and that took a couple days by itself, but getting all my own site was a chore that really wasn’t necessary and if Geocities when just went a little extra mile, they wouldn’t have to close the service in the first place.

What got me writing, though, was that in my zeal to recover my Geocities’ pages, I had to search through this pile of papers and notebooks in a shelf that I have just moved from my parents’ house to the dorms to two different campus apartments and to my current house without having gone through all the crap that was in those papers and notebooks. Most of the stuff were just notes on sites I’d planned to make and the preliminary stages of Dorienne Smith.com, but a good many of the pages were old things I had written in the past decade.

I found my first attempt at a novel that I had started when I was ten years old, Twelve Years. I remember quite clearly that the original title was Seventeen Years, but since I was only ten at the time, I reasoned that I didn’t really know enough about being seventeen to write a book about seventeen years of life, so the obvious action was to only expand the book for twelve years because surely by the time I finished the book, I would be at least twelve years old and would be able to write accurately. The fact that I remember thinking something like this just made me realize that I must have been a really weird kid when I was younger.

In the mess of paper and notebooks, I found a spiral-bound notebook that contained the beginnings of an X-Files’ story that I had first created when I was fourteen years old.  The opening scene was rather disturbing, even for an X-File, and it got me trying to remember what my middle and high school years were like. Whether I’ve blocked them from memory or not, I can’t really doing much more than writing, drawing and making lists to categorize how I was changing. I remember knowing a lot of people, but honestly, I had very few real friends, and after viewing that old X-Files story, and I’m surprised that I’d had any at all. I was definitely a weird kid.

As a kid, I wrote zillions of notes for stories, some of which have materialized (albeit subconsciously) into Damen, I created the beginnings of many stories from those notes and I sketched all the time. I’d gone through college looking back at my high school years as someone who just followed the popular crowds and was real bitch for much of the time, but finding all these notes and writings tells me I was far different from how I’d imagined myself.

I sat down to write my first novel when I was ten years old. It wasn’t like I wanted to create a long story or just write something for my mother. At only ten years old, I had it set in my mind that I was going to write a novel and would someday be able to publish it for others to see. I had actually hand-written 98 pages of this novel before I realized that it wasn’t much more than a thinly-disguised fanfiction and, at twelve years old, I began my first real novel, one that contained characters that were wholly my own. I remember writing it off and on over the next few years and, in late 1999, I finished A Ten Minute Speech. I created a sequel to it, The Martin Drama, and finished it before I went off to college in August 2002. Just thinking about it intrigues me: I had began three “novels” and completed two of them before I was eighteen years old.

Now, while neither completed novel is even remotely publishable in their original forms, I still hold the desire to fully complete them and make them into something that someone without a learning disability could read and enjoy. The fact is, I have been doing this “writing” thing for more than a decade and I can’t believe I’d been trying to do other things with my life for so long, when one look at the piles and piles of notes and story ideas could tell any passerby what I should be doing.

I have been writing novels since I was ten years old. I was a weird kid.

The writer’s log Thursday, May 28, 2009

In revving up DorienneSmith.com into Version 3.0, I’ve finally decided what I am going to do with this blog. “I am kaitco” is going to be my writer’s log, that is, a daily descriptor of my writing and other creative activities.

I had intended to do this with my LiveJournal, but that has turned into a more casual non-political and more secularized version of my Dorienne’s Log and I would like a little more “freedom” to feel like I’m starting fresh with something. Also, unlike with my LiveJournal and Log, this is not going to have any specific goal or direction. Simply put, when I write something (poetry, fanfiction, progress in a novel) I’ll blog about it to have a record of my creative process. The same will go for all things creative, so some days I’ll have uber-long posts while there may be days where I’ll not have much more to say other than Sim X had a baby whom I’ve named Y because I’ll have spent all my time simming instead of doing “productive” things.

I’ll be using a lot of code names for my novel projects, many of which I’ll never take the time to explain seeing as how this is mainly for my own purposes, but I suppose anyone reading for any length of time could get the gist of what I’m saying. I’ll probably also refer to many coding and art projects in the same light. In fact, I may be referring to characters and scenes that may only be fully understood by myself for years to come, but again, this is really a Dorienne project, so anyone reading will just have to take this as-is.

Eventually, I’ll merge this blog with a specified subdomain on DorienneSmith.com, but life here on wordpress.com will suffice at present. Again, I’ve no real goals with this other than to see how this progresses and if I’ll end up something meaningful on which I can look back and see how I’ve “made it” to whatever point.

All that said…let’s begin:

I’m wicked late with my fifth-year “celebration” for DorienneSmith.com. It’s taken me close to three days to figure out how to create a scrolling background in Flash and have some stuff floating on top of it, but I’ve finally worked many of the kinks out of my header and may even have an update for the site by the end of the month.

I’ve not actually written anything in Damen for close to a week. I think it’s because my darn sleep schedule has been so erratic lately, but I’ve at least e-mailed my most recent copy of it to my gmail, so I’m at least marching in the right direction. The goal for tomorrow is to really dig into the scene where Jessie “confronts” him. I’ve hit a brick wall with it for some reason, much like I had with Damen and Anthony taking a drive to the hood. I like to think the wall is something more than simply procrastination, but I’m suspecting that’s all it is.

I’ve been thinking/dreaming about Luka a lot lately. It may be because I’m feeling rather powerless right now and the story is not too much more than a glorified version of a world takeover Dorienne-style, but Luka and Elia keep popping in my mind far more often than they had in recent months. I’m still trying to stay focused though. If I let a diversion like Luka step in between Damen and I at this point, 9/26 will be here before I blink twice and then I’ll really be in trouble.

Anywhoo…I probably won’t get too much of Damen and Jessie’s scene done tomorrow since I’m still in coding overdrive, but if I can just sketch out a little bit more of them, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something.